…and the Bitcoin Breakout

What we now call “The Cantillon Effect” was known far back as circa-1730, by at least one economist.  It hasn’t been taken very seriously in modern times, especially here in the fiat age.

Named after its author, Richard Cantillon, in his “Essay on Economic Theory” (“Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général”) — it is his only surviving work and was published posthumously in 1755, more than 20 years after he was murdered by a former cook whom he had dismissed from his household. The disgruntled ex-employee, returned by night, robbed his home, then set it ablaze, with Cantillon — and the rest of his manuscripts, within.

The Essay On Economic Theory had been previously circulated in pamphlet form, which is why copies survived to be published to the world, and lays bare the dirty secret behind all fiat monetary schemes:

In a nutshell, when money is created or added to an economy, the people who receive it first, benefit, but they do so to the detriment of everybody else.

The early recipients of new money were able to spend it on accumulating more of the productive assets that society had to offer. But this also increased the money supply, which diluted the purchasing power of everybody else’s existing money.

The wealthy got to invest new money.
Everybody else had to spend more of their existing money.

So, while the rich got richer, it made it more expensive for the poors to stay alive.

The elites invariably believe the system works great. From inside their bubble it certainly seems that way. But it is unsustainable over the long haul. As the dynamic iterates, it accelerates, and it increases wealth disparity. If there was a nice, meaty middle-class in the economic bell curve, it wouldn’t last for long as the productive assets increasingly get hoovered up by a rentier class using new money.

Eventually wealth inequality hits a breaking point, and when that happens, all existing social contracts – real or implied – break down.

The French Revolution may be the first example of the Cantillon Effect’s consequences, after Cantillon himself detailed its underlying dynamics.

The distortions introduced from currency debasement are far reaching and take a long time to play out. But the tempo intensifies toward a “quickening” as it enters the end game, much like compound interest and bankruptcy (“gradually, then suddenly”). The rich become more imperious, the poor more resentful and then, finally, after generations of silent theft and economic repression, something sets off a phase shift — and then it’s show trials and guillotines.

In France’s case, the monetary missteps that set it on a course to Bastille Day went at least as far back as Louis XIV, the great-great-grandfather of the Sun King who would be left holding the bag (and his head in a bucket) nearly a century later.

In Guy Rowlands “The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence and Money in Louis XIV’s France“, we are told of “dimunitions” which devalued the coin of the realm by decree, (nevermind that it was gold and silver backed)…

The government would typically prepare an augmentation by decreeing diminutions—or abatements’—of the coins in circulation, a decision that did not require coins to be restamped or re-created. This was not primarily so the king could pull in more coins through taxation (denominated in Livres),” as any such gain would be cancelled out: a diminution would in fact also force the king to compensate his fisco-financiers and bankers for losses on their contracts and on the coins they held at the time. ‘

 

The main reason was so there could be huge leaps upward in the value of the coins to the level decreed by the subsequent augmentation, thus bringing in more seigniorage to the king. The government also hoped that a diminution, generating fear of further diminutions, would flush coin out into circulation, particularly for lending to the fisco-financiers.

That is why diminutions were announced in advance, with weeks or even months before the new, lower values would come into effect. This gave people a window in which to lend out their assets. There were indeed often several diminutions in a row: prior to the 1693 augmentation, the values of the coins were diminished four times; and prior to the great recoinage of 1709, diminutions were announced in March and November 1708 and on 16 March 1709.

The state never brought the coin values back down to the level they bad been before the previous augmentation, and this was important to ensure the public did not think the bottom of the valuation had been reached.”

Does any of this sound familiar?

Cantillon on steroids: The Fiat Era & Stakeholder Capitalism

“Let them eat brioche” — Marie Antoinette, 1789

 

“You will eat bugs, own nothing, and live in a pod” — The World Economic Forum, every day.

With the fiat era, starting in 1971, new money was no longer limited by the supply of gold, or whatever else was backing a currency. You could print the stuff right out of thin air now – which meant that instead of ostensibly enriching all members of society, with its “targeted inflation” for expanding the money supply, it would just accelerate the rate at which the underclass was being impoverished (which for a long time could be papered over with “hedonic adjustments” when reporting on it).

The Global Financial Crisis in 2008, followed by over a decade of ZIRP, NIRP, and QEternity, overclocked that process, and then Covid hit, when it went literally parabolic:

On its own, this may look like just another hockey stick graph. Most people don’t make the connection on exactly how this manifests in the real world (especially central bankers).

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
— John Maynard Keynes 

(Even fewer people realize that Keynes was a Marxist and his economic prescriptions, which form the basis of conventional economic theory to this day, would  lead to socialism. This was intentional. Especially once you understand what socialism really is.)

This graph is just real estate, and as of 2020. That was before COVID, before lockdowns, before small businesses got shut down by decree while big box stores and Amazon stayed open and the Fed bought their bonds.

Let’s look at a couple of inflection points:

The graph above is from Pew Research. In 1971, the start of the Fiat Era, middle income households earned the bulk of the income pie at 62%. Along comes Nixon, who closed the gold window (“temporarily”), and it’s all downhill from there. All kinds of wealth inequality drivers can trace their genesis to that event in 1971.

Then when the bankers blew themselves up (again) in 2008, the bailouts happen (again) and we hit another inflection point: the era of ZIRP, NIRP and QEternity hits, and this is exactly where upper income households crossover the middle income earners. Again, this graph stops short of the Covid Era, at which point all of these trends accelerated. 

Where does it leave things?

The bottom layers of the economic stratum are looking like a cross between Mad Max and a  Zombie Apocalypse. Even worse, is that thanks to plunging income mobility, the underclass is growing.  The middle class are falling into the poverty more often than ascending into wealth.

This Visual Capitalist chart looks at the number of people earning more than their parents by generational cohort. Remember, because of inflation everything is getting more expensive, but if each generation is earning less than their parents, they’re losing ground:

Unless you’re already wealthy – then everything is fine because your share of the pie is getting larger…

All Cantillon Schemes Require a Totalizing Ideology

As I mentioned recently in my article on how abandoning sound money perpetuates Forever Wars,

If there is a far-reaching, multi-generational global conspiracy – it is one that brainwashes the masses into trading their time, wealth and property for meaningless chits backed by nothing. Who needs global Communism?

In pre-Revolutionary France, it was By Divine Right. The king was chosen and appointed by God to govern the kingdom. This belief was used to justify the absolute power of the monarch and his authority over all aspects of French life. And the masses went along with it until the economics became so asymmetrical and unsustainable that the peasants revolted. They had no choice, the alternative was to starve to death.

Today’s totalizing ideology is a kind of euphemistically wrapped Technocratic Marxism. Klaus Schwab calls it “Stakeholder Capitalism”, George Gilder, perhaps more accurately, termed it Emergency Socialism in his latest book, Life After Capitalism.

It’s called “Stakeholder Capitalism”.
(…and you aren’t a stakeholder ) pic.twitter.com/pjyU37SL2o

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) July 27, 2023

Gilder only uses the phrase out once or twice in the book and never really expands on it.

Allow me.

Today’s Totalizing Ideology is that you, dear peasant, must ratchet your standard of living downwards. You will have to take up less space. You will have to consume less resources, you will have to pay more for everything and you must accept ever worsening living conditions because if you don’t, the world will end.

And nobody wants that, right?

In the meantime, your betters, the people who have it all under control and everything figured out, will continue to re-imagine your life, and the lives of your children, so that they can forestall the implosion of the global monetary system and finish hoovering up the remaining 5% of the global wealth that they don’t already own.

“The peasants have no bread”. “Then let them eat bugs”.

Scene at Versailles as elitists who think you should own nothing, go nowhere & eat their processed crickets prepared to feast at taxpayers’ expense.#vampireelite pic.twitter.com/zSeKw7KcqO

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) September 22, 2023

Which brings us to… Bitcoin.

If only there were some mechanism that was not only immune from dilution via inflation, but could actually reverse the Cantillon Effect.

Sure, there is gold – the age old monetary metal. I like gold and have been invested in it for nearly 30 years.  Silver too. Everyone should have an allocation to gold and have some silver, including junk silver to have on-hand for sundries if (or when) your national currency collapses.

But Bitcoin, as distinct from other “cryptocurrencies”, is a very unique monetary asset, backed by energy, decentralized, hard-capped in supply, and largely impervious to capital controls in a way that is distinct from all other monetary assets.

If only there were some mechanism that was not only immune from dilution via inflation, but could actually reverse the Cantillon Effect.
Share on X

To top it all off, Bitcoin exhibits a reverse Cantillon effect. Because Bitcoin is deflationary, it is becoming more valuable.  It is increasing its purchasing power, as more wealth flows into the system and it does so for everybody hodling it. The difference between Bitcoin and Cantillonism is that  the purchasing power isn’t declining as the currency units flow outward from the central spigot. It’s increasing for all units, at the same time.

Most people can’t wrap their head around this. Even the aforementioned George Gilder, concludes that Bitcoin can’t become the new global monetary standard because it is deflationary. And he did it in the chapter of his book called “Bitcoin Capitalism”. Heartbreaking.

But history has shown deflationary currencies not only work, economies thrive under them (see again, Sound Money Makes For Short Wars) – and Detlev S Schlichter wrote an entire book on why that’s the case.

“A monetary system with a money commodity of essentially fixed supply will experience secular deflation. A growing economy, with an entirely inflexible money supply will exhibit a tendency for prices to decline on trend, and for money’s purchasing [power] to steadily increase.

 

But the key question now, is why should this be a problem? We have already seen that historically secular deflation was rather minor and that it certainly never appeared to present any economic difficulties. No correlation between deflation or recession or stagnation is evident under commodity money systems. [T]here are no reasons on conceptual grounds to consider deflation to be a problem”

If there is any disparity, between time and value with Bitcoin, then it’s front loaded. People get into Bitcoin at the price they deserve, but there’s nothing stopping anybody from getting in whenever they want. With the Cantillion Effect, you have no control over new money creation, but yet you still have to live with the declining purchasing power instigated by other people.

With Bitcoin, even if you enter later, you are still on the escalator up, having your sats gain in purchasing power as more capital moves onto a Bitcoin Standard.

We may not have to fire up the guillotines in order to exit this particular episode of Cantillonism, (although we may fire them up for other reasons).

As more people exit the fiat system, the only people left to for the elites to dilute will be the remaining serfs who will get stuck inside the coming CBDC system.

More on that in a future post…

My forthcoming ebook The CBDC Survival Guide will give you the tools and the knowledge to navigate coming era of Monetary Apartheid. Bombthrower subscribers will get it free when it drops, sign up today.

The Bitcoin Capitalist: For Today’s Sovereign Individual provides actionable intelligence on the macro forces shaping Late Stage Globalism and a tactical toolkit for growing your wealth as it plays out. Try it today here.

Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter.

It means they set the rules, and you get to follow them any way you want.

#Davos2021 starts today.

We’ve all been hearing a lot The Great Reset lately, new slogans abound such as Build Back Better, the New Normal, and what seems to be a “new” model called “Stakeholder Capitalism” is being espoused (although it is not new, I wrote about the pendulum swinging from stakeholder supremacy to shareholder supremacy back in the days of Milton Friedman in the inaugural post for this site).

Recently I decided it would be helpful challenge my own reflexive inclination to suspect that we were all being collectively screwed by our institutions, yet again.  I wondered if these momentous shifts were simply one of those tectonic phase shifts that occur throughout history and that I shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that it’s some disingenuous and ultimately malevolent  pseudo-reality being imposed from above.

It is fitting that on this  first day of #Davos2021 I outline my arc in which I tried to suspend disbelief around The Great Reset narrative, forcing myself to pose the question:

What if The Great Reset was getting a bad rap?

Maybe it’s true that the world has changed irrevocably, and that change hasn’t been driven or captured by a razor thin scab of elites at the top of the socio-economic pyramid who are setting the agenda. The idea of a reset may be well founded, after all when I first started writing about wealth inequality and crony capitalism over a decade ago, I called it “Rebooting Capitalism”.

So I started going through Klaus Schwab’s books: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020) and most recently, Stakeholder Capitalism. (2021).  It started out as s a curious blend of nodding one’s head in agreement, underlining numerous passages, musing that maybe this is just descriptive, not prescriptive. By that I mean, maybe Schwab is simply trying to make sense of the shifts occurring, and not really offering frameworks around what should happen next, but just trying to parse what is happening and possible trajectories of the future.

This former case is similar to Warren Mosler’s description of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). It describes how Mosler and other MMT-ers think the system actually works and why the outcomes will not be as conventional economics generally fears. In Stephenie Kelton’s more recent book The Deficit Myth, she builds on this theme that MMT is more descriptive with some prescriptive policy recommendations. But my overall sense of it is that these books about MMT were more about trying to articulate a new way of looking at the existing system and not trying to drive a completely overriding agenda (even if that’s what would happen if policy makers seize on MMT as a rationalization for destroying their currencies).

I mention MMT here specifically because we touch on it again when I contrast it to Charles Hugh Smith’s concept of Community Labour Integrated Money Economy (CLIME), a little later.

With Schwab, he spends a lot of time in a descriptive mode, talking about the what is happening in the world, although we do see some of his assumptions creeping in and for awhile, I am cautiously optimistic that if everything Schwab outlines as a policy response to global issues like global poverty, and of course now, the pandemic, maybe it’s just the way of the world and this is the direction things are going without there necessarily being a SPECTRE-like entity in the WEF driving a self-serving agenda.

When Schwab talks about how a grand ideal of a standard issue One World Government model, what he calls the Neoliberal Utopia simply will not work, I breathe a sigh of relief,

“Consider  a global government [that] regulates multinational companies in global markets, and people gather in a global democracy and global unions. It is an unrealistic an undesirable goal, as it increases the distance between individuals and the immediate social ecosystems they are a part of. It also decreases their feeling of commitment to the people and the environment closest to them…Though the 20th century neoliberalists once may have seen such a global model as a Utopian ideal, it would inevitably end in the political disenfranchisement of local communities. When the center of power is too far removed  from people’s everyday realities, neither political governance nor economic decision-making would have popular support.”
— Stakeholder Capitalism p.181

But then, the more I read, the more I couldn’t shake the sense that when a guy like Schwab uses the word “commitment, what he really means is “obedience”. Schwab understands that people aren’t really going to accept decisions from on high, especially if on high is a centralized world government.

What we really need is “Subsidiarity”

Schwab goes on to introduce with a flourish one of the core pillars of Stakeholder Capitalism: Subsidiarity (the other is “Value creation and sharing”):

A primary principle for the implementation of Stakeholder Capitalism is therefore that of subsidiarity. It is not an untested or purely theoretical principal. Applied most famously in the governance of the European Union..it asserts that decisions should be taken at the most granular level possible, closest to where they will have the most noticeable effects. It determines, in other words, that local stakeholders should be able to decide for themselves, except when it is not feasible or effective for them to do so.

Subsidiarity is supposed to mean “whatever can be done at lower levels of government should not be done at higher levels”, but my guess is the devil would be in the details. Like in that last sentence of the quote, when it is not feasible or effective for the “stakeholders” in Stakeholder Capitalism to decide certain matters for themselves, those will have to be decided for them.

What would those sorts of issues be?

Well for starters, there’s climate change. That’s one of the things that’s already been decided…

“It makes sense to coordinate this challenge first at the global level.” but then the second level is at the national level, where countries can take different approaches, a limit on auto travel would have significant effect in the United States, where cars are the primary mode of transportation. Taking a different approach, such as limiting air travel, would affect certain groups of people more than others. Subsidiarity supports a national or local level of decision making for countries to determine which path will work best for them to effectively address the global goal”.

As Schwab blithely bandies about various limitations and curtailments on everybody else’s range of motion and economic choices, there is never any treatment of climate change as anything but a global crisis that justifies the complete re-ordering of everybody else’s lives.

And yet, the same level of drastic reimagining  of your life is proffered in Schwab’s other book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, even though by his own admission in that same book, COVID-19 is a not civilization ending plague:

“Even in the worst-case horrendous scenario, COVID-19 will kill far fewer people than the Great Plagues, including the Black Deaths, or World War II did”
— COVID-19: The Great Reset p. 17

Albeit one that provides an excellent opportunity to reorder everybody else’s lives,

changes that would have seemed inconceivable before the pandemic struck, such as new forms of monetary policy like helicopter money (already a given), the reconsideration/recalibration of some of our social priorities and augmented search for the common good as a policy objective, the notion of fairness acquiring political potency, radical welfare and taxation measures, and drastic geopolitical realignments.

The broader point is this: the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse. Societies could be poised to become either more egalitarian or more authoritarian, or geared towards more solidarity or more individualism, favouring the interests of the few or the many…

You get the point: we (as in the WEF) should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine your world.

If COVID-19 is a comparatively lightweight pandemic to be opportunistically seized upon to drastically reorder everybody’s lives, one cant help but wonder if the climate “crisis” isn’t yet another global softball. Perhaps in the cold light of day, it could turn out that climate change is either out of our hands (if it is driven largely or even partially by solar cycles) or that climate alarmism is in itself more toxic and destructive than the direct effects of climate change itself, as Michael Shellenberger asserts in “Apocalypse Never”,

Apocalypse Never explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.

Shellenberger, Michael. Apocalypse Never (p. xi). Harper. Kindle Edition.

Shouldn’t there be some sort of process or governance structure in there to protect the world’s citizens from being overly regulated by somebody else’s idea of what is important? Should there be some counterbalance to these unilateral assessments of when drastic measures are required, especially when those measures would supersede our own agency in directing  our own lives?

But there isn’t, not in Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism after the The Great Reset.

What we get instead is “subsidiarity”:

Another example around climate change, conspicuous in its lack of coverage in Schwab’s books is the idea of nuclear energy.

If the entire world is headed toward an eventual transition off of fossil fuels (if for no other reason than Peak Oil) then shouldn’t the safest, cleanest, efficient energy source be featured prominently? The next generation pebble bed reactors and micro-reactors are safe to the point of being effectively riskless when compared to other forms of energy generation and the number fatalities those other forms cause when accidents do occur:

The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people. It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million). By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.

Leading Shellenberger, an environmental activist of 30 years to assert that,

Nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity. In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year….

Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel.
–Shellenberger, Michael. Apocalypse Never (p. 151). Harper. Kindle Edition.

And then there’s also  Thorium, which can’t meltdown and the radiation half-life is measured in weeks, not years. There is no mention of any of this in any of Schwab’s books.

Under subsidiarity, local governments across the world will be tasked with addressing problems Kraus Schwab and the Davos crew (the wealthiest 0.01% of humanity that own somewhere north of $36 trillion of the global assets) deem to be problems, and reorder the world according to how the WEF thinks things should be prioritized.

What are the priorities?

We get some insight by looking at the list of “Deep Shifts” Schwab predicts in his earlier book: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where he posits what the big changes are that are coming at us in terms of tipping points, positive outcomes, negative outcomes and “unknown / cuts both ways”.

Shift #1: Implantable Technologies (p. 121)

“Digital tatoos not only look cool but can perform useful tasks, like unlocking a car, entering mobile phone codes with a finger point or tracking body processes”

(or implementing immunity passports).

Shift #10: Smart Cities (p.144)

Shift #11: Big Data for Decisions (p. 145)

Shift #22: Designer Beings

Tipping point in for this one will be when “The first human whose genome was directly and deliberately edited is born” (which I will point out, has already happened with the CRISPR babies in China).

Shift #23: Neurotechnologies (p. 170)

Tipping point: “The first human with fully artificial memory implanted in the brain”.

Together, they coalesce to usher in an impetus toward transhumanism ordered by Big Data and AI that will probably, in lieu of any honest debate or public consultation around these shifts, result in a type of social credit system.

And that’s what is missing from Schwab’s books. There is nothing in the framework where local communities can identify and define what they see as problems for themselves and work toward solving them. There is no mechanism for asserting their own priorities of types of things the communities themselves may value above the WEF’s “Deep Shifts”, such as full or meaningful employment, privacy, or self-sovereign health care.

Directionality matters

In other words, what is missing from Stakeholder Capitalism is that, despite paying lip service to inclusion and community, there are no actual mechanisms for priorities coming from the bottom up.

What I’ve been realizing is that you can take two systems that have outwardly similar mechanics, like  MMT and Charles Hugh Smith’s CLIME. Both systems describe an economy from which money is created ex nihilo to fulfill or generate economic activity. But from those two frameworks one can envision two very different outcomes: hyper-inflation and a two-tier society on one, and a robust community of involved economic actual stakeholders getting stuff done in the other. Why?

Because one is a top-down framework where the incentives are set by policy makers removed from the economy they attempt to fine tune, while the other is a bottom-up ecosystem where actual economic activity is a direct result of market signalling and community needs.

Conclusion

After reading through the Schwab material having initially forced myself to suspend judgement,  I now am now firmer in my initial suspicions that The Great Reset, Stakeholder Capitalism and Build Back Better  slogans that come out of these annual Davos circle jerks are blissfully oblivious to what they themselves actually are.

They believe that the role they are ostensibly to serve is as the “enlightened stewards” of society, taking the liberty of reimagining everybody else’s lives.

In reality, they are the living embodiment of uber-woke super wealthy elites , so tacitly sure that their belief systems are the product of their own personal enormous material success that they can’t really be beliefs but self-evident truths. After all, if they were wrong, they wouldn’t be super rich, right?

What is being proposed however, what The Great Reset and Stakeholder Capitalism is, isn’t just benignly wrong-headed or egregiously presumptive: it is chilling.

It doesn’t specifically call for social credit, or an AI-driven authoritarianism, yet that is what its tenets and incentives will produce. It aspires toward transhumanism, and so far all indications are that governments, and global elites seem to be buying into it and singing the “Build Back Better” mantra of Stakeholder Capitalism in concert.

If The Great Reset comes about, and I think it’s already here, it will lead to that two tier society where the world’s underclass are governed algorithmically via smartphones, digital, programmable scrip (UBI) and well ordered dopamine hits. Meanwhile the far smaller populace that actually owns all the assets globally live in a parallel universe where they retain agency, freedom of movement, diet, and thought.

On my mailing list I talk about what we can do as individuals to try and get clear of The Great Reset. Because even if we loathe this with every fibre of our being, find it oppressive and tyrannical, anti-human, anti-spirit and soulless, we won’t be able to do anything about it from the wrong side of the impermeable membrane that will very soon cordon off the haves from the haves-nots.

We have to defend our liberties, our civil rights and our assets in the New Normal. In a worst case scenario it’ll require forming an underground network a la Isaac Assimov’s Foundation. The Foundation’s stated purpose was to survive the onset of a Galactic Dark Age and preserve the accumulated culture and wisdom of a civilization that had irrevocably embarked on a path that would trigger its own demise.

Now more than ever it is important we all try to improve things from the grass roots level as the Stakeholder Capitalism rubric may be the last gasp of a system about the come off the rails completely or after a prolonged period of disruption and tyranny.

Charles Hugh Smith and I are working on a base framework for CLIME that will empower communities to create their own local exchange currency and take control over their own community economies.

• Join my mailing list to be notified about that and get other advice on surviving The Great Reset.
• Start setting up on alternative communications channels like Telegram, Signal and Keybase (we’re setting up a Bombthrower Telegram here)
• Support third-party political parties like the Greens if you’re left-of-center or the Libertarians or PPC if you’re on the right; withdraw your financial support and votes from incumbent political parties everywhere, at all levels (more on this in another post).

Hold your ground where possible, but prepare for a type of Samizdat communications culture for awhile. We may have to keep in touch with each other from the underground. The mainstream media will be no help and Big Tech is part of the problem.